In the autumn of 1928, a wave of terror gripped Omaha, Nebraska, as a silent predator moved through the city, armed with a hatchet. The string of brutal attacks began in a quiet home in North Omaha, where a 74-year-old man named Joseph W. Blackman became the first victim. A former expressman, Mr. Blackman lived a peaceful life, but that peace was irrevocably shattered on the morning of Sunday, November 18, 1928.
Mr.
Blackman, a Male, was asleep on a daybed in the front room of his house at 4121 North 28th Street. His son was also in the room, sleeping nearby. The son awoke that morning and, seeing his father seemingly still asleep, tried not to disturb him. As time passed, an unsettling stillness prompted the son to check on his father. When he lifted the blanket, he made a horrific discovery: his father was covered in blood, having been brutally bludgeoned to death as he slept. Investigators soon found the murder weapon, a bloodied ax, hidden under a pile of wood near the house.
The murder of Joseph Blackman was not an isolated incident but the beginning of a spree of violence that would leave the city on edge. The very next day, two sisters, Gertrude Resso and Creda Brown, were found hacked to death in their beds. Shortly after, a married couple, Harold and Mary Stribling, were viciously attacked in their Carter Lake home by an intruder wielding an ax. Harold was severely injured, and Mary was also wounded before being abducted and left in a dazed state near the swamps on the edge of town.
Acting on a tip and Mary Stribling's description, Omaha police arrested a man named Jake Bird. Bird was a transient laborer who had arrived in Omaha in the summer of 1928 after witnessing the death of a traveling companion in a railroad incident nearby. He chose to stay in the area to testify in court regarding the death and began looking for work. Though Mrs. Stribling identified Bird as her attacker, there were conflicting reports about her certainty at the time. Fearing a potential lynching, authorities quickly moved Bird to the state penitentiary in Lincoln for his safety.
Despite being the prime suspect in the ax murders that had terrorized Omaha, Jake Bird was never tried in Nebraska for the killing of Joseph Blackman or the Resso-Brown sisters. Instead, he was prosecuted in Iowa for the attack on the Striblings and received a 30-year sentence. He served only a fraction of that time, being released for good behavior on Christmas Eve in 1941. For years, the full scope of his violent history remained unknown, and the murder of Joseph Blackman was officially unsolved.
The final chapter of the case came nearly two decades later and hundreds of miles away. On October 30, 1947, Bird was arrested in Tacoma, Washington, for the savage ax murders of a woman and her daughter. While on death row awaiting execution, Bird began to talk. He confessed to being a prolific serial killer, claiming to have murdered as many as 46 people across the United States during his years of travel. He provided enough detail for law enforcement to substantiate at least 11 of those murders, allowing them to close long-cold cases in multiple states, including one in Omaha.
Known as "The Tacoma Ax-Killer," Jake Bird was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder in Washington. His violent journey, which had brought such fear to Omaha in 1928 and ended the life of Joseph Blackman, finally concluded when he was executed by hanging on July 15, 1949. His confessions posthumously closed the case on a series of brutal killings that had haunted communities across the nation for years.
